"Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews"--

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin “ The Lede contains profiles . . . that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer. Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation . But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press. In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. He writes about a legendary crime reporter in Miami, a swashbuckling New York Times reporter, and an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from an appreciator of the French nouvelle vague into a crude connoisseur of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire . There are pieces on the House of Lords aspirations of a North American press baron, the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the embroilment of a weekly newspaper in a missing person case, and the founding of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking . Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an unparalleled portrait of one of our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.

"An expedition into the troubled soul of one of the world's greatest songwriters."-- Haaretz "A fascinating and intense account of Leonard Cohen's time in Israel during the 19-day Yom Kippur War of 1973. A must for any Leonard Cohen completist."--Suzanne Vega A Vanity Fair Best Book of 2022 * Mosaic Magazine Best Book of 2022 The untold story of Leonard Cohen's concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War, including never-before-seen selections from an unfinished manuscript by Cohen and rare photographs In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen--thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end--traveled to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a group of local musicians, Cohen sang for hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen, reigniting his creativity and inspiring him to compose some of his most memorable songs. Who by Fire provides a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen's previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, existential moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.

"If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread--or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold--and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved--and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives."--Jacket.

"It is a collection of essays that takes up, in a mostly affirmative way, various challenges to the coherence of the "human body" as a figure through which culture is processed and oriented." Partial contents : The end of the world of White Men ; Class and its close relations : identities among women, servants, and machines ; Soft fictions and intimate documents : can feminism be posthuman? ; Reproducing the posthuman body : ectogenetic fetus, surrogate mother, pregnant man ; The seductive power of science in the making of deviant subjectivity ; Phantom and reel projections lesbians and the (serial) killing-machine ; "Death of the family."

""The Face of Violence"" is a thought-provoking essay by the renowned scientist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, exploring the nature of violence and its impact on society. The essay is accompanied by a play, also written by Bronowski, that delves deeper into the themes discussed in the essay. The play tells the story of a man who becomes increasingly violent as he struggles to cope with the pressures of modern life. Through the essay and the play, Bronowski challenges readers to consider the root causes of violence and to reflect on how we can work towards a more peaceful and just society. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the complex issues surrounding violence and its effects on individuals and society as a whole.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

The Black Diaspora tells the enthralling story of African-descended people outside Africa, spanning more than five centuries and a dozen countries of settlement, from Britain, Canada, and the United States to Haiti, Guyana, and Brazil. Ronald Segal's account begins in Africa itself, with the cultures and societies flourishing there before the arrival of the Atlantic slave trade, which transported over ten million people to the Americas, after killing at least as many in their procurement and passage. He examines the extent of the profits made through the trade by merchants, manufacturers, investors, and planters, along with the racist ideology that developed as whites strove to rationalize an enormous economic dependence. Segal describes the various ways in which the system of slavery developed and provides the most comprehensive account to date of the resistance by the slaves themselves, from escape and arson to guerrilla warfare and revolution. When emancipation finally came, the former slaves were left in the fetters of poverty and discrimination. Segal details the course of the struggle against colonial rule and the racial oppressions of self-styled democracies. In recounting his own travels through the Diaspora, he shows the continuing plight of peoples confined by the consequences of the past and the prejudices of the present: racked by violence, as in Jamaica and the ghettos of America; denied the right to assert their sense of identity, as in Cuba; acknowledged only to be repudiated, as in Brazil. Yet this is also, Segal reveals, a Diaspora of wondrous achievement. It has immeasurably enriched world culture in music, language and literature, painting, sculpture and architecture; has done much to make sports a form of art; and has invested Western culture with the ecological reverence derived from its African source. Segal argues that the black Diaspora has a unique destiny, infused by the love of freedom that is its creative impulse.

This book provides the first dedicated study of the Evian Conference of July 1938, an international initiative called by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While on the surface the conference appeared as an attempt to alleviate the distress faced by Jews being forced out of Germany and Austria, in reality it only served to demonstrate that the nations of the world were not willing to accept Jews as refugees. Since the Holocaust, a generally-held assumption has been that the Evian Conference represented a lost opportunity to save Germany’s Jews, and that the conference failed to rescue the Jews of Europe. In this study, Paul Bartrop argues that in fact it did not fail when measured against the original reasons for which it was called. Exposing many of the myths surrounding the meeting, this work addresses a glaring lacuna in the literature of the Holocaust, and places the so-called 'failure' of the Evian Conference into its proper context.

It is the story of Jozsef Sondor, a tough, irreverently witty Jewish boy growing up in World War II Hungary. Jozsef carries the reader into the whirl of everyday life in war-torn Budapest, from the eve of the Holocaust in Hungary to the Russian liberation in 1945. Through his eyes, we witness history, or, as he sees it, the adult world gone mad. What is this "Jewish problem", he asks. And what can God be thinking of? Jozsef soon finds that his questions have no simple answers, but they do lead him on a journey to understanding the war, politics, religion, and, in the end, the complexity of human nature.

Israel's Mission to Oliver Cromwell is a historical account of the Jewish emissary Menasseh ben Israel's efforts to secure the readmission of Jews to England in the 17th century. The book recounts Menasseh's journey from Amsterdam to London in 1655, where he met with Cromwell and other prominent figures to argue for the rights of Jews to live and worship in England. The book provides insight into the political and religious climate of the time, as well as the challenges faced by Jewish communities throughout Europe. It also explores Menasseh's personal journey as a prominent Jewish leader and scholar, and his efforts to promote Jewish learning and culture. This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Jewish history, the history of England, or the intersection of religion and politics in the 17th century.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

"Michael Taussig's new book, Corpse Magic, is animated by the ubiquity of violence across the world. Focusing on state-sanctioned violence in Colombia in the context of gangs, guerrilla warfare, and police action, and in the US, in the form of mass shootings and the killing of Black Americans by the police, Taussig examines the effects of violence not just on its victims, but also and especially on those who inflict it, as well as those who witness and relive it through footage circulating in the media. Taussig analyzes the haunting idea that the act of killing "infects" the killer and spreads outward, and he connects this to a belief he encountered in Colombia, namely that the souls of the slain possess those of their slayers, and that magic must be used on corpses to circumvent this process. Drawing from literature, religion, and philosophy as well as anthropology, Taussig analyzes violence as contagion, one through which the killer and the killed are mutually defined. What kind of power do the dead continue to have? What kind of magic can enact vengeance? What kind, if any, can stop apparently endless cycles of violence? These are only some of the provocative questions raised in this powerful, creative work"-- Provided by publisher.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.